Elizabeth Ashley was a film actress of the 1960s and '70s, remembered for intense, in-your-face characters who seemed "liberated" years before that term was used to describe women. Her memorable films include Ship of Fools, Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday, Coma, and Vampire's Kiss. She is primarily a stage actress, however; and won a Tony in 1962, for her Broadway debut in Take Her, She's Mine. She was also Tony-nominated for Barefoot in the Park with Robert Redford and a 1974 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which she played Maggie and said her job was "to give every man in the audience a hard-on."

In 1977, Ashley was raped and severely beaten by three drunken men at an abandoned gas station near Bakersfield, California. She did not reveal the rape publicly until 1993, when she testified in the trial of a man accused of raping a friend of Ashley's.

In a story Carroll Baker told in her autobiography, George Peppard showed up drunk at Baker's door during the filming of The Carpetbaggers, loudly telling her he wanted her. When Baker said she was not interested, Peppard threatened, "If you don't have a love affair with me, I'll make love to Elizabeth Ashley." Baker was resolute, and Peppard, true to his word, had an affair with Ashley, destroying both their marriages. Peppard and Ashley then married.

In the 1990s she had some success as a supporting actor on television, with roles on the sitcom Evening Shade and the soap opera Another World.

In 1999, Ashley was preparing to write her autobiography, and had all her mementos shipped from storage to the New York apartment she had rented for 22 years. The apartment was destroyed in a fire, which investigators traced back to a cigarette Ashley had left smoldering when she went out for breakfast. Firefighters found more than $10,000 cash in her partially-burned duffel bag, but all of Ashley's other possessions were destroyed.